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(RW) Philosophy: John Kaag
31 Plays24 days ago
(REWIND) Season 2, Episode 6: Professor John Kaag is the Chair of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Listen to John talk about mental illness, the golden mean and how transcendence is related to healing.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Wound Dresser' Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
You're listening to The Wound Dresser, a podcast that uncovers the human side of healthcare. I'm your host, John Neary.
Meet the Guest: Professor John Kag
00:00:21
Speaker
Today, my guest is Professor John Kag. Professor Kag is the chair of philosophy at University of Massachusetts Lowell and a former Miller scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. He's the author of the award-winning books, American Philosophy, A Love Story, and Hiking with Nietzsche, both MPR books of the year.
00:00:39
Speaker
More recently, he wrote Six Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. John, welcome to the show. Great to be here.
Can Philosophy Help Us Cope with Suffering?
00:00:48
Speaker
um So a while back I was reading a collection of short stories about medicine and the author wrote, every physician is a philosopher alluding to the connection between philosophy and healing.
00:01:00
Speaker
Can you discuss how studying philosophy can help people cope with their suffering? Sure. So I think that philosophy from its inception,
00:01:11
Speaker
um was supposed to be some very smart self-help. um I mean, many ancient philosophers thought about philosophy as a type of therapy and it's supposed to give you some way of thinking through the difficult business of living.
00:01:28
Speaker
um Philosophy oftentimes comes out of what are known as existential questions. The questions, who are you? Why are you here? Why do I suffer? how do I deal with my suffering? How do I deal with tragedy? And philosophers from Socrates forward in the West have really been interested in um questions that obviously have to do with truth or reality or ethics, ah but really um those questions come from deep existential places in human you know human beings. um And we ask existential questions when we are going through difficulty.
00:02:12
Speaker
um So in part, um philosophers, force us to confront the human condition and the suffering that attends the human condition, and then gives us ways of thinking about it and dealing with it in our everyday lives.
00:02:30
Speaker
The term used in both hiking with Nietzsche and Six Holes Healthy Minds is dis-ease.
Understanding 'Dis-ease' Through Philosophy
00:02:35
Speaker
Can you describe the experience of dis-ease? Yeah, I mean, i was using de disease um as a feeling of uncanniness or dis-ease, like not at ease, um but also disease in the sense that, you know,
00:02:52
Speaker
in philosophers like Nietzsche and philosophers like William James and um many American philosophers, I'm thinking of Henry David Thoreau, all were pointedly aware that um life is the you know life is the process of dying and um we are moving toward the grave as soon as we are born.
00:03:15
Speaker
and how to make good on those on the moments that we still have is really the principal task of um many 19th century philosophers, Nietzsche included. so When we think about disease, usually we think about it in a very discreet form that happens maybe at the end of the end of life or happens to someone else. But really what philosophers like James and Nietzsche and Thoreau are interested in pushing forward and pushing on us is is the fact that we but we have a sort of certain, how do I say it?
00:03:50
Speaker
That are we have a condition called life that is very limited and that we're in the process of moving toward the end quickly. And then how do you how do you confront that and do so in a meaningful way where someone can still tap meaning in the time that they have?
William James: Integrating Disciplines for Practical Philosophy
00:04:12
Speaker
Few people remember that William James was trained as a physician at Harvard Medical School. I really am fascinated by James because of his wide ranging interests in medicine, physiology, psychology, philosophy, and religion.
00:04:25
Speaker
Can you discuss how James combined these disciplines to give the philosophy community a unique perspective?
00:04:32
Speaker
Sure. I mean, I can try. ah So William James was a polymath. that he He thought about becoming an artist at one point, and then he moved on to physiology, then he moved on to philosophy, then he moved on to religious studies.
00:04:48
Speaker
And James was um living during a time when um the way that you think about being human was changing very rapidly. So Darwin publishes The Origin of Species in 1858.
00:05:03
Speaker
And um at that point, thinkers in the next two decades, in the 1860s and 1870s, really had to think about what it meant for us to be an embodied biological organism and how are we still going to tap lasting meaning if we are um deeply constrained by our physical form. And that's what James is interested in as he moves from his anatomy classes at Harvard into um his work in philosophy and psychology. And um what James is famous for doing is really thinking about the relationship between the body and the mind. Philosophers prior to James had had a lot of trouble understanding that we are embodied emotionally laden organisms. And James insisted that we were and that we actually needed to use different methods to understand ourselves. ah One of those methods being empirical psychology. James publishes the principles of psychology in 1890 as the first major work in empirical psychology in the United States. and James's philosophy, his pragmatism, is really a way of um taking those insights from the psychology and then applying them to philosophical problems. so The problems of meaning, the problems of truth, the problems of understanding reality.
00:06:37
Speaker
all of them needed to be contextualized by um empirical science and particularly a certain approach to physiology and biology that James reflects in the psychology.
00:06:51
Speaker
Can you explain more on James' explorations into consciousness? I know he really dives into that in the variety of varieties of religious experience and and you know perhaps how we can you know look on that today as as being relevant in our healthcare system and our society in general.
00:07:07
Speaker
Sure. So James, we need to remember that American pragmatism comes out of American transcendentalism. So the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau. And during the eighteen thirty s in Concord, were um thinkers were resuscitating or bringing over into America the romantic idea that experience and consciousness um was an important or the important philosophical concept that should be explored. um
00:07:41
Speaker
So why is experience and consciousness interesting? Well, if you think about life, um there are many things that we can change about life in terms of action or in terms of the way that we adjust our habits. And and James was very interested in the way that we can remake ourselves. But he also believed that um there were certain points in life where you couldn't change your circumstances, but rather you could change the way that you think about things or the way that you see things. um And I think that think that this change in perspective and also the broadening of perspective, and understanding what sight truly means and how,
00:08:22
Speaker
um how expansive it can be was something that James thought can give humans like us lasting meaning. James said something like, um we usually live our lives half awake or um you know we we see the world through a glass darkly most of the time. And the point of life is to see things, or one of the major points of life, is to see things a little more clearly and a little more expansively. So James's interest in consciousness ah was...
00:08:59
Speaker
is oftentimes taken as like this philosophical intervention into what empiricism took to be as and experience or sense data.
00:09:09
Speaker
And that a pragmatic or transcendental understanding of experience was richer. it was it It reflected a certain continuity that empiricism like Hume, for example, didn't think that experience was continuous in the way that James does.
00:09:30
Speaker
um We usually take his investigations in consciousness as mere philosophical interventions. And what I really am interested in is the way that James thinks about experience and consciousness as enriching our lives, and that philosophy should emerge from experience and then enrich experience.
00:09:51
Speaker
And that's what I take to be distinctive about his pragmatism, is that he says that when he says that truth is to be judged on its practical consequences, what he also means by that is that truth is to be judged on the way that it emerges from experience or consciousness and then enriches our consciousness or experience.
Philosophy's Dual Role in Mental Health
00:10:12
Speaker
In your books, you talk pretty openly about ah your struggles with mental health. Can you elaborate on the wisdom you've gained from James, Nietzsche, and other philosophers on how to work through mental health challenges?
00:10:24
Speaker
Sure. um So I have to say straight away that philosophy can oftentimes... um I have to say straight away that philosophy can oftentimes help you out of mental crises, but it can also deepen mental crises. So just as a caveat to the comment that I'm about to make. So as I was a teenager and as I was going through high school, I struggled a great deal with anxiety and depression and an eating disorder, a serious eating disorder, and compulsive eating disorder. And, um,
00:11:00
Speaker
eating disorder and um I first was drawn to philosophy because I could hear in the writings of folks like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, um I could hear what Schopenhauer would call in his studies in pessimism, i could hear a type of companion in misery. So oftentimes when you're experiencing mental um distress, you feel very alone or isolated. But if you read particular types of philosophy, like, well, you could read him the Vedas or you could read any type of, you know, the Lotus Sutra, or you could read and sort of excerpts from Buddhism or 19th century philosophy like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
00:11:50
Speaker
you you're going to get the message that life is suffering and you're going to feel like you're not quite so alone in some of the turbulence that you're experiencing. That's the first point. The second point is that philosophers, especially through the 19th century, were interested in thinking about ways to combat um depression that ah you know defined the coming of our contemporary life.
00:12:19
Speaker
um What I mean by that is Nietzsche, especially working in the 1870s and 1880s, was aware that our the luxury of life and the ease of our um some of our contemporary lives um would not free us from, but rather deepen, depression and anxiety.
00:12:43
Speaker
And he was interested in ways of combating that. So um from Nietzsche, I received a ah couple of very valuable lessons about, one, about decadence and the way that decadence can operate to de decay a life. So the easier life is not necessarily a better life. The second is that Nietzsche thinks that we can find meaning in struggle.
00:13:12
Speaker
um What I mean by that is if you think about the most meaningful parts of your life, they're oftentimes um the ones that we have to struggle or strive through them.
00:13:24
Speaker
um that's That's Nietzsche's interest in the Greek word agon. um Then there's Nietzsche's critique of Christianity that says that self-deprivation should not be confused with meaningful struggle and that compulsive activities like self-deprivation, forms of self-deprivation, are pathological and that they can lead us away from the meaning of life rather than toward it.
00:13:54
Speaker
um And then, I mean, finally, I've been attracted to philosophers like Nietzsche, who believe that the aesthetic, the beautiful, the sublime, can actually give us outlets for tragedy and for um understanding the sufferings of life. And I found that deeply meaningful. um one One additional point is that I'm typically attracted to thinkers who have two sensibilities. The first one is that we have free will and that we can change our lives in radical and unexpected ways first. And then secondly, that there comes there comes a point in life when we need to accept and indeed come to love the circumstances that we've been given. And those seem like diametrically opposed impulses. But if you think about Emerson and Nietzsche and William James and Paul Tillich and Viktor Frankl, all thinkers who have sort of given me hope through the years, including Jane Addams and Margaret Fuller, I mean, these thinkers all have this dual sensibility, which seems contradictory, but is actually, i think, should be understood as two poles that we pursue simultaneously in life to both change our lives as we can,
00:15:25
Speaker
David And then, at the same time, to accept or come to love those things that we. David Miller, That we've been given the circumstances that we've been given, so I have to say straight, I mean I should be very straightforward with you um i'm i'm in the throes of.
00:15:41
Speaker
David Coven and so as so as my entire family, and so the the changing the circumstances that you can change and then. Larson, Coming to accept or love the circumstances that you can't. David Larson, Has a life and death significance, I think.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, a couple follow questions to that. I know at the beginning you said, you know, philosophy can both ah help you work with some of that mental suffering and but also deepen it.
00:16:09
Speaker
Do you feel like there's can you kind of describe moments where you're sort of at a crossroads where you either need to pick sort of your mental well being or maybe philosophical insight. And my second question would be, um you know, clearly suffering has probably, you know, increased your your your philosophical aptitude, so to speak. So, like, do you feel like you would, given the choice, would you want to forgo a lot of your suffering to to sort of live life on a less deep plane?
00:16:39
Speaker
No. I mean, um straightforwardly, no, I would not. I'll answer that one first. I mean, um would i prefer to have not had bypass surgery at the age of 40? Would I have preferred not to suffer through anxiety and depression? Would I have preferred not to go through um two divorces? The answer is that in hindsight, i and on good days, I would say no i I would rather...
00:17:10
Speaker
you know, play it all again, do it all again, in order to, you know, live the life that I have. um Your second question, I think is an interesting one, which which is, um are are there certain times when you have to choose between your mental, between your sanity and the philosophical work that you do? And the answer is yes, I think that, you know,
00:17:39
Speaker
that philosophers and especially professional philosophers have a tendency to bury themselves in books and thoughts rather than to actually live. um And I've discovered over the years that now my writing has slowed down considerably, primarily because I just have so much living to do.
00:17:59
Speaker
I have a wife, I have two kids, um, and I have a house that needs to be cleaned and there's stuff, there's stuff to do, um, and not just thought about, or not just written, or you know, written about.
00:18:13
Speaker
Um, and some of my readers have have reached out to me and have said, why aren't you writing more? There was this time when you wrote continually. And, um, the answer that I give them is that, um,
00:18:27
Speaker
is that I just don't have time and or inspiration to do so. i mean, I used writing as a mask for many, many years and as a as a way of avoiding life.
00:18:43
Speaker
And I just have stopped doing that. So um I think I had to come to terms with that in order to sort of deep in life, but also get a good better perspective on what writing and what philosophy actually meant.
00:19:00
Speaker
two um to To answer to your question in another way, there are many times when young readers or young philosophers take on the ideas of their intellectual heroes whole hog.
00:19:19
Speaker
And I would caution against that just as I would caution against people thinking that that philosophy is completely worthless. There needs to be a bit of perspective on what philosophy can actually do for us, which is not the same as thinking that it can just simply take over our entire lives.
00:19:36
Speaker
As you alluded to earlier in early 2020, you survived a massive cardiac event.
Personal Journey: Mortality and Meaningful Living
00:19:42
Speaker
Can you talk about this experience and how it changed your view on mortality? Sure.
00:19:47
Speaker
I mean, in in February of 2020, I was running. I mean, I i was an avid runner. I'm now a shuffler. um But i was an avid runner and I was running on a treadmill. I ran six miles at my um university. when I hopped off the When I hopped off the treadmill, I laid down on the ground and went into cardiac arrest and, um, had to be resuscitated, um, or shocked back to life.
00:20:19
Speaker
And, uh, then I was taken to Tufts medical center where I was kept for three weeks and they discovered that I had, um, abnormal right coronary artery, which is the leading cause of death in, um,
00:20:34
Speaker
athletes, um young athletes. So um the events that I'd had as an athlete, as playing soccer or swimming or rowing, um where I would pass out after events really wasn't just me passing out, but having small um cardiac events that had scar, it had created major scar tissue in my heart.
00:20:58
Speaker
um And then in 2000, in the spring of 2020, I had bypass surgery and had an ablation, which is where they laser out the scar tissue. And then also they re-roofed my right coronary artery, which means just they re they put it into that position.
00:21:19
Speaker
So, um and the, your question is how does that change your perspective on mortality is it we oftentimes think about dying as something that happens at the end of life that comes after one has lived a very long and prosperous life but more often than not it's not that way at all you you die well before uh you're ready and um That's something that i had to think about very, very carefully. And also I had to think about the the issue of moderation.
00:21:57
Speaker
um I had never been moderate in my exercise or in my life up to that point. And my cardiologist basically said to me, well, you need to you need to find the golden mean, which is a very old philosophical term the you know or idea expressed by Aristotle.
00:22:15
Speaker
um You need to find the sort of golden midpoint between too much exercise and not enough exercise, or you're gonna end up doing this again to yourself. um And so um it scared it really scared me. So I think that what it has done for me over the last two years is it has placed into,
00:22:38
Speaker
um
00:22:40
Speaker
it has made very clear to me the necessity to prioritize life. So um I try not to spend time on things that I would rather not spend time on, or if I have to spend time on them, then I try to find the most meaningful way of doing things.
00:23:02
Speaker
um them. In other words, turning drudgery into something a little bit more meaningful. And I think philosophy is pretty darn good at telling us how to do that. I think somebody like Thoreau or Margaret Fuller or Jane Addams is pretty good at telling us how to transform everyday life into something extraordinary.
00:23:24
Speaker
So I've been trying to do that, which means that I'm not writing about it so much, but I'm just trying to do it. um I think it also has, in terms of actually doing philosophy, um it has pushed on me a certain type of,
00:23:43
Speaker
I guess it's hum, it's it's a certain type of fallibility it's not even humility it's It's like you understand that you are just one little person um and the best that you can do is sort of make your way through life and be part of communities that will outlast you um and do your small part and do it the best that you can.
00:24:10
Speaker
But don't the the grand ambitions have sort of been mitered considerably since February 2020 for me. I'm no longer interested in winning a National Book Award or Pulitzer, I don't know, something that like big big dreams.
00:24:30
Speaker
So anyway, that's a long, sorry, that was very long and consoluted. Yeah, two questions off of that. um You mentioned the golden mean, which is it was just definitely an important topic in our healthcare system. Can you talk about why that's that's such a moving target for patients and why, like what about the human condition makes moderation so hard?
00:24:52
Speaker
And my second question um
00:24:59
Speaker
relates to ah this idea of crisis that you you often write about. do Do we need crisis to change or is change possible in less drastic circumstances? i think those are two nicely related questions. um The first about the golden mean.
00:25:18
Speaker
um I think the golden mean is a impossible to achieve in life, primarily because it's this asymptotic ideal. i mean, it's this something that we can approach but never achieve. um Like the perfect midpoint about things, about the perfect midpoint between being too full and not full enough. The perfect point between exhaustion and complete laziness. I mean, the perfect point between I mean, we're humans and we can achieve that type of perfection. Now that seems like a cop out. um What I think is more more appropriate is that our are both our culture and the way that we are just wired as human beings tend toward extremity.
00:26:09
Speaker
um Because on the one side, i think that we're um prone to a type of laziness or to a type of ease as organisms.
00:26:25
Speaker
And then on the other side, we're we're prone to a type of
00:26:31
Speaker
completely spending ourselves in exertion. And that might be just a human
00:26:38
Speaker
human proclivity, where we feel ourselves most alive when we are, you know, going to the extremes, when we feel like we're making actual choices when we're at the extremes. The midpoint seems almost boring, right? So um I think that there's that confusion especially in our contemporary Western culture where we're not really living if we're living in the middle.
00:27:05
Speaker
So that's one thought I would have. The other thought is that, um i forgive me, John, remind me of the second the second question, which was related. Oh, I was just asking, you know um do we need crisis to change or do you feel that you know we can change in less drastic circumstances?
00:27:29
Speaker
um I think we better learn how to change in less drastic circumstances. I mean, the the problem about relying on crisis to change our life is that it's almost always after the fact, right? I mean, it's almost always in hindsight when where we think, oh, we should have changed earlier.
00:27:47
Speaker
It's when you're lying on the ground and you think, oh, I shouldn't have been running that at seven minutes, you know that mile at seven minutes or at six minutes. I should have been running it at eight minutes, but it's too late. like And you go into cardiac arrest. So i think um we better learn in our lives to change our life on the basis of small, even mental or intellectual crises. In other words, um you can be lying in bed and you can think to yourself, I really have to find a new path without the path being completely blocked in a practical sense.
00:28:27
Speaker
um And I think that we can do that. And I think that the process of becoming a well-adjusted adult is allowing um your mind and discussions with others ah before they reach reach point of crisis to change our lives.
00:28:43
Speaker
Now, it is absolutely the case that disaster and tragedy has can, for some people, have transformative powers. But I don't think that that it should be relied upon, because oftentimes the time for real change has already passed by that point.
00:29:02
Speaker
In hiking with Nietzsche, you wrote, according to Nietzsche, there are two forms of health, the futile type that tries to keep death at bay as long as possible, and the affirming type that embraces life, even it's in its deficiencies and excesses.
00:29:16
Speaker
Can you speak more to these two forms of health and how this dichotomy might be relevant in modern medicine?
Nietzsche on Quality of Life vs. Longevity
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah, you bet. So, I mean, we oftentimes think that the more life, the better, right? I mean, the like the whole point of health and um mental health and our medical system is to keep us as keep us alive for as long as possible. But anybody who has worked with anyone in palliative care or in hospice knows that that's not the case. I mean, the point of life is not just duration, but rather um quality. Okay. And this is the distinction that Nietzsche is making. We have an almost obsessive, no, we have an obsessive desire in our Western culture to remain young and to remain healthy and to remain beautiful.
00:30:10
Speaker
And i the David Foster Wallace in This Is Water said it very well. If you if you worship beauty and young you know youth, you will always feel ugly and old and they will bury you a million times before they actually, or you will feel as if you've been buried a million times before they actually plant you.
00:30:34
Speaker
um Nietzsche's onto this as well, so is Socrates, so is Thoreau. um that the point of health is actually to embrace life, to live fully and and through the tragedies and through the fallibility, through the finitude.
00:30:53
Speaker
um And that's a very different orientation than simply keeping death at bay, which is the first way of understanding health. The second way is to to own up to your life, to your
00:31:11
Speaker
And in all of its forms. I mean, i am I said to you, I'm a shuffler now. I'm not a runner, which is true. I run eight minute, nine minute miles, which is for for me four years ago, it would have been pitifully slow.
00:31:27
Speaker
um And what I try to do these days is to simply
00:31:35
Speaker
experience and enjoy shuffling. And I think that that's what Nietzsche means, to rejoice in life with all of its tragedies, which is different than me trying to find a way to run a and you know a bunch of consecutive six-minute miles again.
00:31:59
Speaker
A common question throughout your work is, is life worth living? I believe our healthcare professionals should take advantage of in intimate relationships with sick patients to ask these sorts of questions and use illness as an opportunity to identify what really matters.
00:32:14
Speaker
How do you think we can better incorporate philosophy into a clinical setting?
How Can Philosophy Enrich Healthcare?
00:32:20
Speaker
I would imagine that it starts with um the healthcare care provider. In other words, um I think that
00:32:31
Speaker
There are so many healthcare providers that are overtaxed and my brother's one of them, he's a surgeon and he has been working weeks his entire life it seems And it seems like they're creating a bit more space in the life of the healthcare workers that they could actually think for a second um or have a chance to meditate on finitude or disease or anxiety or depression or what is actually happening um might actually be a first move to, and and I mean, that's a systemic
00:33:12
Speaker
um it's a systemic change that would have to occur in modern health, which is to say, um those who probably need the time to simply think or read or meditate are those who um have the least time and ability to do so.
00:33:33
Speaker
um I think that many nurses who i encountered and many um assistants who I've encountered have a great deal more insight about true health
00:33:53
Speaker
than some of the most proficient doctors that I've seen and surgeons that I've encountered. It is very rare. My cardiologist, Dr. Hamoud at Tufts is maybe the exception to the rule. But um the taking a cue from the assistants and from the nurses,
00:34:14
Speaker
about what health actually means and having a chance to actually talk it through and talk it through with patients might be a first might be a first way forward. maybe Maybe it's completely unrealistic to carve out another 20 minutes in an already packed day, but um there should be some sort of reckoning with um why are healthcare care professionals so overtaxed and where do financial margins for institutions, where do they actually impact the way that healthcare care providers can think carefully about the
00:34:59
Speaker
the meaning the true meaning of health, because I'm almost certain that institutions are also trying to stay alive in hospitals, medical centers, and the burden falls on healthcare providers who don't have the time or luxury to think about what health means or to think about um how they might be able to speak more carefully and more philosophically with their patients. Many of them have the ability to do so, but many of them don't have the time.
00:35:34
Speaker
So that's one one sort of thought. Another thought is that um teaching and providing medical service ah to patients needs to be prioritized as much as research.
00:35:55
Speaker
And um that goes for
00:36:01
Speaker
the humanities and the social sciences as well. I mean, we are at the risk of becoming the
00:36:12
Speaker
We're at the risk of allowing our obsession with research and advancement in medicine, trumping what it means to give effective treatment and trying to recenter us around effective treatment, I think starts probably with emphasizing and rewarding teaching and patient care.
00:36:39
Speaker
over over so other forms of research. So those would be, so it's an issue of time and then an an issue of prioritization. i know you frequently kind of talk about philosophy as a life and death issue that perhaps people in our healthcare system don't see, you know, sort of patient's philosophical orientation or what have you to be kind of a life and death thing. They're more worried about, ah like I said,
00:37:07
Speaker
biophysical, ah you know, physical biomarkers as opposed to their the the orientation they feel in sort of there their philosophical space. Right.
00:37:18
Speaker
I mean, i I think that there are, they're it's very difficult to quantify um someone's ability to give a good account of his or her own life, right? Which seems to be at least what Socrates in the West, what philosophers have oftentimes taken to be the most important things about life is to have you been, ah do you feel like you can give a good account of what your time here on earth has been like?
00:37:47
Speaker
um Can you give a good account? which is very different than can I stay alive as long as possible. But the the point that I initially am trying to make is it's it's tough to quantify what the value or what the effectiveness of giving a good account is. What is very easy to do is to give a quantitative account or give a quantitative measurement of you know biophysical markers or charts.
00:38:16
Speaker
And so I think that um first we need to be realistic about what sort of measurements we're interested in taking, what sort of measurements matter.
00:38:28
Speaker
I mean, Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics is really good on this point. He says, at the very outset, he says, we should be realistic about um the measurements that we take for certain disciplines.
00:38:44
Speaker
I mean, mathematics can be measured in one way, physics in another, ethics in another, certain sort of biomedical markers in another. And we need to be we need to not expect certain measurements and certain quantativeative quantitative descriptions ah to be provided in certain disciplines. One of those disciplines is um
00:39:13
Speaker
you know, psychiatry, for example, or in um psychology, ah where you don't necessarily have the same sort of definitive measurements.
00:39:25
Speaker
And I think that what medical professionals might do to good effect is to give themselves a chance to think about other ways of measuring the quality of life for their patients.
Transcendence and Spiritual Healing
00:39:41
Speaker
Last summer, I attended a professional retreat geared towards spirituality and medicine. a memorable quote I took away was, healing is about transcendence. I believe transcendence is a concept frequently referenced with regards to Nietzsche.
00:39:57
Speaker
What does transcendence mean to you and how is it relevant in the healing process?
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:10
Speaker
So transcendence, I think, can mean a number of different things when it comes to healing. I'll start at the most basic and secular. in other words, non-religious or non-spiritual level.
00:40:23
Speaker
So when you're sick, you oftentimes feel stuck. You feel stuck in your present moment. You don't feel like you can move forward. You feel like you're not moving forward. You just feel stuck.
00:40:37
Speaker
And transcendence is at its most basic, I think, is the visceral feeling of getting unstuck. In other words, the feeling of moving forward, the feeling of moving into a future of your own making, the the movement of yourself into tomorrow.
00:40:56
Speaker
And I think that that very basic feeling is the feeling of healing. It's the feeling of moving from one position in your life to another position in your life. And hopefully one where you can say, i have made some sort of ameliorative move. I've i've gotten better. Okay. So healing is about transcendence just in the sense of you you move out of your current position into some sort of future position, and that is a different position. That's transcendence.
00:41:28
Speaker
But I think that as you move up through sort of this very basic non-secular description into something that is more spiritual or more religious, um I think that the the experience of being being reborn or transformed is the feeling of is the feeling of transcendence, but also it's also the feeling of going from being very ill,
00:42:02
Speaker
well and then regaining life. And that feeling, I think, is one that resonates very closely with many types of religious revelation.
00:42:15
Speaker
So the idea of being reborn, coming alive again, um you know ah William James describes the six-souled individual, the person who oftentimes feels like the universe is out to get him or her or them, um describes the six-souled person as being twice-born, which is another form of being reborn. And i'm thinking I'm thinking about coming to on the floor of UMass Lowell's gym after they used the manual defibrillators on me.
00:42:54
Speaker
um And that feeling of coming back to life is a feeling of going from one place to another, um kind going from one moment to another, but going from one state to a radically different state in a very short order. And that feeling of being transported from one state to a radically different state is the feeling of transcendence or it is transcendence.
00:43:28
Speaker
um at ah At a more spiritual level, it so we're working from the secular or non-spiritual to the much more spiritual.
00:43:38
Speaker
um I think that many patients experience when they're laid low or laid out or confront death or sickness,
00:43:53
Speaker
there's a type of leveling of the self. What I mean by that is you feel yourself sort of passing away.
00:44:04
Speaker
And the experience of yourself passing away is obviously very disturbing. it's It's like, oh my gosh, I'm losing myself. I am literally passing away.
00:44:16
Speaker
But I think that there's also the possibility in many patients that I've encountered to experience a strange connectivity with the universe in that passing away.
00:44:32
Speaker
And you might say like, what are you talking about, John? Well, at a very basic level, um what oftentimes separates us in our daily lives is the sense that our self-pursuits or that are that are self-care trumps everything else. In other words, when in my daily life, I pursue the path of the self.
00:45:04
Speaker
it's It's my dinner. It's my grocery shopping. It's mine, mine, mind mine, mine. But in great sickness and in times of great crisis, there and when you're losing yourself,
00:45:17
Speaker
And then when you regain your health, there's a sense that the self has been put into a different type of context. um There is a sense that it can be lost very easily, that it's really kind of ephemeral.
00:45:31
Speaker
And this, I think, in certain patients allows them to become a little more selfless. um That is to say, to connect and allows them to connect with something beyond themselves, their be therapy beyond their own very narrow selfish concerns.
00:45:55
Speaker
And I think that that's a... a meaningful offshoot of being sick and of working your way through disease is to transcend your own very narrow constraints as a human being and to actually realize
00:46:15
Speaker
that that that our obsession with self is oftentimes what separates us. And like the Buddhists say, like we are all suffering beings and that we're all suffering our in our own little ways, absolutely individuated.
00:46:37
Speaker
But maybe that selflessness, you know the the loss of self is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it allows us to become a little more selfless. Yeah, I think that that actually ties quite into a book I just finished reading about psychedelics, actually, by Michael Pollan. And i I think he kind of describes psychedelic research, which is growing in the healthcare field, as as sort of this losing of self. And it's it's commonly used in patients at end-of-life care and things like that.
00:47:04
Speaker
My final question for you, kind of springboarding off that, is you know, you kind of have this realm of philosophy um and this realm of spirituality. I guess you can obviously critique the way I'm thinking about it, but I always kind of think philosophy sort of in the realm of your mind, you're kind of using your your logic and your your your rational self to to work through things. And then spirituality is kind of about stepping outside of that, getting a little space and just sort of, ah I guess, losing that self, like you said, can you kind of
00:47:36
Speaker
ah compare how you see philosophy versus spirituality playing a role in healing?
Philosophy vs. Spirituality in Existential Questions
00:47:41
Speaker
Sure, I can try. um So, I mean, I think that philosophy
00:47:49
Speaker
in the last hundred years has definitely turned into a lot of logic logic chopping. And um it is extremely... um arrogant about what the, what our rational capacities can accomplish.
00:48:09
Speaker
Um, and that probably stems from rationalism from, from the modern era, I guess, not just the last hundred years, but it's become extremely pronounced in the last hundred years. What were the rise of what's known as analytic philosophy?
00:48:24
Speaker
Um, I think that, um,
00:48:31
Speaker
I think that rationality can only take us so far in matters of being human. And I think philosophers have the ability to reach the boundaries of thought and then consider what might be on the other side, which might tip them, oftentimes does tip them into spirituality.
00:48:56
Speaker
um In terms of healthcare, care um the the question, why am I dying?
00:49:06
Speaker
is a question that can be answered with science and logic in certain ways, right? Why am I dying? Well, it's your capillaries or it's your, you know, the cell growth that you have going on or it's a senescence or it's, you know, there there are explanations for the the question, why am I dying as answer.
00:49:30
Speaker
as an answer But in my experience, patients oftentimes when they ask, why am I dying, are asking it in an existential or spiritual way.
00:49:41
Speaker
And I think that our medical professionals and also our philosophers can take the question, why are you dying to a certain point with rationality or with empirical methods, but then they need to recognize that they hit a wall.
00:49:57
Speaker
And then they need to think, how do i provide relief and answers to a patient who is suffering, right? And who is asking the question, why? Why am I suffering? Why am I dying?
00:50:11
Speaker
And so I think that the point of philosophy is oftentimes to reach um to reach its limits. We think about this with witkins move um wittkin so vi i'm sorry she's covered Wittgenstein.
00:50:27
Speaker
we we we run ah ah run run the we basically you you reach the limit of meaningful thought So too with Kant, he's reaching the limits. He's thinking about the conditions for the possibility of truth or the conditions for the possibility of priori, synthetic a priori truth.
00:50:54
Speaker
um the The point is is that that maybe philosophy, the point of philosophy is to reach its to reach the wall of rationality or thought.
00:51:06
Speaker
And then to see what other resources might be used other than rationality in order to provide relief or to provide insight. Yeah, I think that's awesome what you just said that like i'm I'm very interested in palliative care. And I think like what you're saying, right, you just hit the wall when you're staring over death and mortality that, you know.
00:51:31
Speaker
Rational thought can only take you so far, you hit sort of ah an asymptote. And from there, you can you can sort of flip over to spirituality as an alternate way, like you said, to find relief or insight. So thank you for sharing that.
00:51:45
Speaker
Oh, thank you. And so now it's time for a lightning round, a series of fast paced questions that tell us more about you.
Quickfire Round with Professor Kag
00:51:52
Speaker
Okay, go for it. So who is your favorite philosopher?
00:51:59
Speaker
ah like Doug Anderson, because he was my first and most important teacher. And I think that philosophy is teaching. So Doug Anderson.
00:52:10
Speaker
Next. What's your favorite outdoor activity?
00:52:16
Speaker
oh Walking, running, and playing with the two dogs and the two kids. What's your ideal Friday night? ah Having a glass wine with my wife, Kathleen.
00:52:29
Speaker
When you're on a road trip, what are you listening to? Chris Stapleton. And a new philosophical idea you're looking forward to exploring. I guess I'm i guess i'm interested in this, um in the relationship between cynicism and altruism.
00:52:51
Speaker
ah Between what it means to walk away from the world and the civilized world and what that can do in terms of reorienting you to kindness and to um selflessness.
00:53:10
Speaker
So that's what I guess is gonna come next and principally through the writings of Thoreau and um not that Thoreau was perfect on this, but I think Thoreau gives us some ways and and an unknown philosopher by the name of Perez Blood, who was Thoreau's friend.
00:53:29
Speaker
Professor John Kadd, thanks so much for joining the show. Thanks a lot for having
00:53:44
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Wound Dresser. Until next time, I'm your host, John Neary. Be well.